44 Scotland Street - Alexander McCall Smith [8]
“If you cared anything about me, you would have made the effort,” she had said to him. “But you don’t and you didn’t.”
He had been appalled by this attack. There had been very Fathers and Sons
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good reasons why he could not go to London, apart from the expense, of course. And he had had every justification for cancelling that weekend: he had entered the wrong date for the Irish international at Murrayfield in his diary and had only discovered his error four days before the event. If she thought that he was going to miss that just to go down for a weekend which could be rearranged for any time, then she was going to have to think again, which she did.
He stood up and stepped out of the bath. As he did so, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, and smiled. 4. Fathers and Sons
Somebody had pushed a bundle of advertisements into the mail box of the Something Special Gallery, which irritated Matthew Duncan. It was Tuesday morning, and the beginning of another working week for Matthew, who took Sundays and Mondays off. He was early that morning – normally he opened at ten o’clock, as it was unheard of to sell a painting before ten, or even eleven. He believed that the best time to make a sale was just before lunch, on a Saturday, to a client who had accepted a glass of sherry. Of course, private views were even better than that, because crowd behaviour then entered into the equation and red spots could proliferate like measles. That, at least, was what he had been told when he had taken over the gallery a few weeks previously. But he could not be sure, as he had so far sold nothing. Not one painting; not one print; nothing at all had been bought by any of the people who had drifted in, looked about them, and then, almost regretfully in some cases, almost apologetically in others, had walked back out of the front door.
Matthew flung the advertisements into the wastepaper bin and walked into the back of the gallery to deal with the alarm, which had picked up his presence and was giving its first warning pips. 14
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The code keyed in, he flicked the light switches, bringing to life the spotlights that were trained on the larger paintings on the walls. He enjoyed doing this because it seemed to transform the room so entirely, from a cold, rather gloomy place, inadequately lit by natural light from the front window, into a place of warmth and colour. It was not a large gallery. The main room, or space as Matthew had learned to call it, stretched back about thirty feet from the two wide display windows that looked out onto the street. Halfway down one side of this room there was a desk, which faced outwards, with a telephone and a discreet computer terminal. Beside the desk there was a revolving bookcase in which twenty or thirty books were stacked; a Dictionary of Scottish Artists, bound catalogues of retrospectives, a guide to prices at auction. These were the working tools of the dealer and, like everything else, had been left there by the former owner.
Matthew had acquired the gallery on impulse, not an impulse of his, but that of his father, who owned the building and who had repossessed it from the tenant. Matthew’s father, who was normally unbending in his business deals, had been an uncharacteristically tolerant landlord to the gallery. He had allowed unpaid rent to mount up to the point where the tenant had been quite incapable of paying. Even then, rather than claim what had been owing for more than two years, he had accepted gallery stock in settlement of the debt and had paid rather generously for the rest.
Matthew’s father, despaired of his son ever amounting to much in the world of business. He had started Matthew off in a variety of enterprises, all of which had failed. Finally, after two nearbankrupt stores, there had been a travel agency, a business with a promising turnover, but which under Matthew’s management had rapidly